People in the USSR first learned about The Beatles in the early 1960s, at the peak of beatlemania. At that time, newspapers wrote sarcastic articles criticizing pop music. Soviet articles usually criticized The Beatles appearance and the “primitive” nature of the music. But then the situation slowly started to change.

Soviet Press on The Beatles in the 60s

One of the earliest publications, from 1964, “The Jumpers,” contained this passage:

“They called themselves the ‘Beatles,’ a word that can mean ‘little beetles,’ ‘snitches,’ or ‘jumping jacks.’ To be honest, they never expected to become famous around the world. It was just for fun—yelling, jumping, and shaking to music played on a washboard and other similar instruments. Also, the fans of these “beetle-jumpers” shout so loudly at their concerts that you can’t even hear the performers. What you can see are mouths that are twisted and hair that is unkempt covering the entire forehead.”

Other items about the group at the time had titles like «Pithecanthropus on the Thames,” “From the Life of Bees and Dung Beetles,” “For Beethoven and Bach—Against the Beatles,” and “Monkeys and the Twist.” Many of these stories were based on articles by Western journalists who also criticized the group in its early years. Soviet writers emphasized that musicians’ popularity is short-lived. They described The Beatles as unruly hooligans who would soon be forgotten.

But Soviet youth didn’t pay much attention to the official press. People were used to the idea that if a newspaper criticized something, it was important. Although Western records were not officially sold in the USSR, there was no ban on the Beatles.

Starting in the mid-1960s, people found ways to bring records from business trips or to buy them on the black market. Diplomats, party officials, and even KGB employees brought in LPs with music that was considered harmful in the Soviet Union. The price of these records could reach an average monthly salary. So, most people recorded songs off the radio and from one another once tape recorders began to appear in the late 1960s.

This unofficial import of rare goods continued until the mid-1980s.

“People whose fathers sailed on ships and brought things from other countries would sell them,” says musician Boris Bardash. “Some people took specific orders. Others just bought whatever they thought would sell here. They didn’t care because there was a special group of people: all sorts of privileged kids, switched-on speculators. They had records, jeans, and plastic bags with pictures. Even a brand-name bag with some English writing and images was a popular item. They sold it for 2–3 rubles. That was very expensive. It was just a bag you could carry around with you, so people could see that you were part of a special group. This was the late 1970s and early 1980s.”

The First Appearance On a Soviet Radio in 1966

The first eight Beatles songs were played on Estonian radio in the Soviet Union on January 27, 1966. It was a mix of songs from the first four albums. In Estonia, as in Lithuania and Latvia, the authorities were more accepting of Western culture than in the rest of the USSR.

In April, an article titled “Idols and Idolaters” came out. In it, Aleksandr Konnikov talked about a summer 1965 concert and said the songs were good. “They are musical and artistic. They play the guitars very well. Many of their songs have hints of traditional Scottish folk melodies. The themes are ordinary and boring: love, going on dates, and whether or not the date goes well. The performers move well and put a lot of emotion into their performances.

By the fall, the magazine Angliya, which published translations of English-language writings on culture, ran a very optimistic article by George Melly about the group and pop music as a whole. It seems to be the first publication in the USSR that talks about The Beatles and the Rolling Stones without laughing at them.

The First Official The Beatles Soviet Release

The first Beatles song in the USSR, “Girl,” was released in 1967 on the 10-inch record Musical Kaleidoscope No. 8 (33D-20227-28). It is the only Soviet record with a Beatles song released before the band broke up. The back cover names the group, but the music and lyrics were credited as “folk” (“народные”), and part of the Russian translation of the lyrics was printed alongside.

“As the record said, ‘music and lyrics: folk, in English’; the band’s name wasn’t there, but everyone knew it was the Beatles,” recalls artist Dmitry Shagin. “At dances in a Pioneer camp, we played this song. By the time I was 12–13, I already knew all about the Beatles. You could also hear them on Western radio. It was jammed, but you could still catch it—they played the Beatles there too.”

After that record, other musicians started releasing covers in both Russian and English. In 1968, Emil Gorovets was the first to record a slightly slowed-down version of “A Hard Day’s Night” and a Russian version of “Yesterday.” In 1969, he recorded “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Lady Madonna,” just a year after the originals. (In the early 1970s, he moved to Israel and then to the United States because of Soviet antisemitism.) In 1970, a flexi-disc by the group Vesyolye Rebyata came out with a translated version of “Drive My Car.” In 1971, Golubye Gitary (Blue Guitars) recorded “I Saw Her Standing There” in English, fairly close to the original.

The Beatles in Krugozor Magazine (Soviet Union, unofficial)

In short, until 1973 there ware no modern-like copyright law in the USSR. This allowed Melodiya to avoid paying royalties for the use of recordings in the USSR and publish any music and texts freely. In a 2011 interview, Olga Markina, a Melodiya HR, said that the company just couldn’t have done things differently under those laws.

“A legal environment can’t exist in fragments or islands. Either it exists or, as with copyright in the USSR, it doesn’t. I understand the critics’ arguments, but Melodiya could not have been different inside a state with such an exotic legal framework. The choice wasn’t between the law and breaking it; the question was whether to work under those conditions or not. We chose to work.”

Paul McCartney

In October 1972, the magazine Krugozor put Paul McCartney’s “Man We Was Lonely” and “Give Ireland To The Irish” on its flexi-disc, along with an article about him (the author avoided mentioning “the Beatles,” calling them “a vocal-instrumental quartet that existed from 1960 to 1969,” but wrote favorably about Paul).

Paul McCartney’s review from Krugozor magazine, 1972

His fans simply call him Paul. He is a working-class man from Liverpool, an English port city. If not for music, he would probably have become a mechanic or an electrician. He has been singing since childhood and started playing the banjo and guitar in school. One day, on a street in Liverpool, he met a guy named John. Paul taught his new friend to play the guitar. However, since Paul was left-handed, it was difficult for John. In order to find the correct position for his fingers on the guitar neck, John had to look in the mirror the entire time.

In 1960, John Lennon and Paul McCartney formed a vocal-instrumental quartet that lasted until 1969. Now, each former member is going their own way, usually working with their own ensemble.

Paul McCartney’s band is called Wings. In his solo recordings, he experiments a lot and touches on pressing issues in modern-day England.

In March 1972, McCartney and Wings recorded a new song that became the subject of fierce controversy immediately—even before its release. Record store owners refused to sell the “unpatriotic,” seditious song. The BBC blacklisted it. Volunteers sold the record on the streets. The song was Paul McCartney’s “Give Ireland Back to the Irish!”. “Britain, great power,” the song goes. “What do you want with this country across the sea? Would you like it if Irish soldiers searched you on your way to work? So give Ireland back to the Irish! Don’t wait until it’s taken from you by force. Give the country back to its people!”

You can hear this song, along with another new recording,
by McCartney, “We Are Lonely,” on the audio page of our magazine.

A. Petrov, a review from Krugozor Magazine, 1972

In 1973, the compilation album World of Songs (Mir pesen) included his song “Junk.” After that, Krugozor published several more articles about McCartney’s new works through the 70s and 80s.

John Lennon

In April 1974, Krugozor published a positive article and two John Lennon songs—”Luck of the Irish” and “New York.” In the review, Lennon is described as a working-class lad from Liverpool. There are numerous inaccuracies and errors, for example, Give Peace a Chance is referred to as Give the Boy a Chance, and it is claimed that Lennon bought his first guitar with his earnings as a construction worker.

John Lennon’s review from Krugozor magazine, 1974

Musical Rays of the Planet
He once said: “We represent modern views.” This was said
when John Lennon was the leader of a popular band of four working-class guys. Although fans of modern jazz could relate this phrase to music,
style innovations, Lennon gave it a different meaning, which he explained in his statements and work.
The modern young man’s cry to the world draws close attention to today’s burning issues and the difficult problems of Western society.
People often write about Lennon, “A working-class guy from Liverpool, he remained one.” John Lennon’s biography influenced many of the lyrics of his songs.
He bought his first guitar with his salary as a construction worker. This is where his working life and art first came together. Soon, his satirical poems were published, in which he mocked the “English state system.”
While traveling around the world with the band and starring in films, Lennon saw not only crowded concert halls and movie theaters applauding their favorites. He looked into a world where other passions raged. He observed closely and did not hide his attitude toward events.

Racism?
Lennon and his friends declare, “We’re not going to South Africa or anywhere in the United States where the audience is segregated.”
Military hysteria? Lennon sings his anti-militarist anthem, “Give the Boy a Chance,” in Toronto.
Ties to communists? The young musicians are not afraid of attacks from the reactionary press. They gladly give interviews to the British Komsomol magazine Challenge.
Even after the band broke up in 1971 and Lennon began performing solo, his views didn’t change.
Just listen to the titles of his songs: “Power to the People,” “Working Class Hero,” and “The Ballad of St. Peter’s Wreck.” You will feel their civic pathos.
The tragedy of Northern Ireland, the courage of Angela Davis and the cruelty of American prison guards became themes of songs filled with anger and pride. These songs are collected in the album Sometime In New York.
Two of them can be heard on the eleventh audio page of the magazine. The first is “Irish Song.” John Lennon performs with his wife, Yoko Ono.

George Harrison

In December 1974, it published three George Harrison songs, including “My Sweet Lord” (which is remarkable given the USSR’s ban on religion), plus an article about the Concert for Bangladesh.

George Harrison’s review in Krugozor magazine, 1974

“Fundraiser for Bangladesh.” Concert posters bearing this inscription appeared in New York City in the summer of 1971. Three days before the box office opened, people began besieging it to purchase tickets.
George Harrison, the Englishman who initiated the concerts to support the young Asian republic in its fight for independence, had years of experience performing in public. Like everyone else in his large working-class family, he started earning a living early and devoted his evenings to music.
Shortly after his fellow Liverpool natives Lennon and McCartney formed a band, Harrison joined them.
He was the youngest member of the group. He made remarkable progress as a guitarist and gradually developed a taste for writing his own songs. Through his music, he tried to address profound and significant issues that affected everyone, whether they concerned love, politics, purely English problems, or racism in South Africa.

His compositions often begin with a mood-setting guitar riff. In 1966, he used the Indian tabla drum for the first time in the song “I Love You Too.” This was the result of his interest in Indian classical music; Harrison had studied with sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar.
He now lives mostly in London, where he composes music and songs for stage and film. After leaving the band, he released three albums with eloquent titles: “Everything Must Go,” “Bangladesh,” and “Life in the Material World.”
Fans of pop music are excited to know if the band members will reunite. None of them deny this possibility, except perhaps for promotional purposes, but it seems like Harrison is more enthusiastic about it than the others.

Ringo Starr

In 1975, Krugozor even featured two songs by Ringo Starr (No. 7, 1975).

Ringo Starr review in Krugozor magazine, 1975

When the vocal-instrumental ensemble, famous not only in Great Britain but also around the world, broke up into four independent groups, all the Western newspapers
predicted the group’s musical demise. The gloomiest of these predictions concerned Ringo Starr.
After all, what could a drummer do alone, without his singing and composing companions?
“Of course, he’s no Caruso,” British newspapers wrote about him. However, Ringo Starr proved that he was more than just a “barrel-chested” background for his friends.
On his own, he found success in two art forms: he starred in three films and released his own record.
While the traditional nature of the westerns Candy and The Blind Man prevented him from developing as a film actor, There Will Be a Day brought him real recognition. In it, he played a philosophical 1950s boy.

Starr’s album, aptly titled Ringo, restored his former glory. Finally, his voice was heard, and it was warm and friendly. The debut album also featured his former bandmates. He brought them together again for the Ringo album. John Lennon wrote the humorous song “I’m the Greatest” for it, Paul McCartney wrote “Six Hours,” and George Harrison contributed “Snapshot.” Ringo himself wrote the song “
“You’re Sixteen,” which was later recognized as the best.
However, the most significant event in Starr’s life was his involvement with the war-torn and famine-stricken Republic of Bangladesh. Together with George Harrison, Starr held a large concert, donating all proceeds to the country that had defended its independence. Thus, Ringo Starr devoted his talent and energy to the noble cause of fostering brotherhood between nations.

The last record and article about the Beatles in Krugozor appeared in 1988.

Official but Illegal: The Beatles on Soviet EPs (Vinyl Minions)

In the 1970s, The Beatles 7 inch EPs are slowly started to appear in the USSR. Melodiya used the same sleeve design for different albums without any titles. Sometimes the design included musical instruments or abstract graphics. Other times, it shows photos of the forest.

In 1974–75, five EPs also appeared with songs from Abbey Road (released in small portions), Let It Be, Sgt. Pepper’s, and various singles from different years. These EPs did not have album titles or the band’s name. All of these records were issued without licenses by various plants. It seems that only the Tbilisi plant printed sleeves with photos of the musicians.

That same years, flexi-discs were released with Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” “Crippled Inside” (which included a photo of Lennon), and “Oh My Love”; McCartney’s “Heart of the Country” and “Ram On”; and a disc with “Birthday” from the White Album (on the compilation Vocal-Instrumental Ensembles of the World).

“All of them were snapped up,” Boris Bardash remembers. “Anyone who knew about it could immediately tell you the number of tracks and the titles: “The Sun Rises,” “Because,” “Medley”… EPs, but at 33 rpm—a Soviet thing. A Beatles compilation, one or two Creedence records, something from Deep Purple—that was the most you could get, and everyone who was into music had already bought them.”

Licensed Beatles Records in the USSR

Starting in 1973, licensed records began to appear, but with different covers and track lists.

Soviet Band On The Run LP

In 1977, the albums John Lennon and Ensemble Wings were released. The first one was mostly the same as Imagine, with the back cover picture of Lennon facing the other way (it was moved to the front of the cover). The second one was based on Band on the Run, but it didn’t have the title track. Instead, it had a song called “Silly Love Songs.”

Taste of Honey — USSR Beatles LP

In 1986, Melodiya released two albums: a compilation called A Taste of Honey, which was made from the band’s first three albums, and the album A Hard Day’s Night.

Soviet Hard Day’s Night — Two LP Version

The A Hard Day’s Night album was released without “When I Get Home,” but it was mastered using DMM (Direct Metal Mastering). A total of 300,000 copies were made, and they all sold out as soon as they were put on sale.

At the same time, a double set was released with A Taste of Honey and A Hard Day’s Night. The A Hard Day’s Night album came in a special sleeve, and it was pressed at the Aprelevka plant. Today, this sleeve is rare and can cost about $20.

There are two reasons why “When I Get Home” wasn’t included in A Hard Day’s Night. The first one is more popular: Soviet censors rejected the line “I’m gonna love her till the cows come home” because they thought it was too indecent. The second option, which was more realistic, was buying licenses for individual songs to make a compilation. This was cheaper than buying the license for the original album.

McCartney’s Back to the USSR

Also, there were two McCartney LPs: Flowers in The Dirt and Again in the USSR (CHOBA B CCCP / Снова в СССР ).

Unofficial Beatles Pressings (Late Soviet & Russian Releases)

AnTrop started releasing records with the White Album in 1991 and released almost all of the main studio albums, as well as the single “Hey Jude.” This marked the end of their records with Abbey Road.

By then, A Hard Day’s Night had already been officially released by Melodiya, while Please Please Me, With the Beatles, and the compilation Past Masters were issued slightly later by Santa Records without the active involvement of Andrei Tropillo.

Santa essentially continued AnTrop’s work at the same pressing plants, which were managed by Nikolai Kibalchich. I’ll add some of their releases as well later.

© 2025, Artur Netsvetaev, interview with Boris Bardash

Images: author’s archive, beatlespress.com.ua, beatlesvinyl.com.ua

Cover Art Comparison

The Beatles’ logo font is different, yet similar to the original one.

The Gatefold

The “gatefold” is a collage of early-1960s band photos—uniform size, high quality, not magazine clippings.

The photos’ source

While researching this cover, the author traced the images to a set found in Paraguay: Topps Chewing Gum collector inserts issued in the U.S. in 1964–65. The first series had 60 black-and-white cards sold for five cents per pack; Sy Berger designed the cards, with 399 in total across the sets.

Trifonov says he had collected these inserts for over 25 years and wanted the gatefold crammed with gum-card photos. He’d gathered about 40 since starting in 1968 — buying singles or small lots whenever they surfaced — and preferred “overpaying to have it” rather than regretting a missed find.

Kibalchich learned the Riga plant didn’t make gatefold sleeves, so they printed a paper insert instead.

Back cover

Labels

The labels — unusual for Antrop/Santa — show musician silhouettes, and the full track list appears only on side B.

© 2024, Artur Netsvetaev. Interviews with Nikolai Kibalchich & Yuri Trifonov.

Don McCullin’s photograph was replaced with a compositionally similar image. On different print runs, the initials of Nikolai Kibalchich appear either on the right or on the left, but the cover designer is Yuri Trifonov.

“The front cover is mine,” Trifonov says. “This photo was re-shot from some English book. And in my view it fit perfectly. I’d grown tired of the original photo: it always annoyed me with its lack of sharpness. We would have found a better-quality replacement, but we had to work with what we had — there was no internet back then. Later this photograph appeared in the book Mad Day Out.

I was surprised they ended up making it yellowish. Depending on the print run, the tones came out differently: sometimes yellow, sometimes gray, sometimes more saturated — later a different print shop handled it. On the back, Kibalchich just stuck on whatever was at hand.”

Back sleeve

On the back, Nikolai Kibalchich used the same original design:

Like some other releases from 1993, the back of this sleeve has a very bad print quality.

Tracklist

The Russian Hey Jude LP is a one-disc roundup of late-1960s singles and compilation tracks. Think of it as a tweaked Hey Jude (some songs swapped out, others added) and a partial Past Masters: Volume Two.

It drops the two openers from the original Hey Jude — “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “I Should Have Known Better” (both from A Hard Day’s Night) — and the three closing tracks from Past Masters: Volume Two: “Across the Universe,” “Let It Be,” and “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” likely to fit the LP’s time limits.

Instead, it features The Inner Light, Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out.

There is no other edition in the world with this exact track list. Trifonov recalls:

“Kolya Vasin personally took charge of the track list. As usual, he tried to cram in some of his own picks. In the end I didn’t even get a copy: everything was gone — blink, and there were none left.”

Hey Jude in the USSR

In the Soviet Union, Lady Madonna was translated into Russian and sung by Emil Horovets. It also became a homophone with ironic meaning (read about Beatles mondegreens in the USSR).

© 2024 Artur Netsvetaev, interviews with Yuri Trifonov & Nikolai Kibalchich

It looks like the cover was taken from the CD booklet, enlarged, and left unchanged—only the white frame around the photos is gone. The font of the title was swapped out for something more “fancy”.

The print quality is pretty low, like the covers of Animals, Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road, It’s Only Rock’n’Roll, and some other releases from 1992-93. The halftones is clearly visible.

Back sleeve

The back cover is black and white, the photos were mirrored.

A booklet

Some copies of Let It Be came with 16-page booklets that had the album’s history, photos, and song translations.

New “fake” sleeves

When I was looking for a copy of the record in decent condition for my book, I came across an ad on one of the marketplaces selling records with covers in perfect condition:

I was a bit puzzled by these covers. The print quality was surprisingly good, and the front side, with the Antrop logo in the corner, looked just like the original album cover. The seller said his records were original from Antrop, but he printed the sleeves himself, and they were new.

And he’s not the only one. A lot of sellers are now replacing old, worn-out sleeves with high-quality copies.

Let it Be in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, Let it Be was perfomed in russian with a different lyrics in the 1970s. It also became a mondegreen (read about Beatles mondegreens in the USSR).

© 2024 Artur Netsvetaev, interviews with Nikolai Kibalchich, Yuri Trifonov.

Cover art comparison

The ideas were ambitious: for example, there were plans to reshoot the cover with Tropillo and his colleagues crossing Rubinstein Street, near the site of the Leningrad Rock Club. But things went wrong, and they ended up using a different version.

In the Russian bootleg, McCartney’s got on black shoes, while Lennon is barefoot. This is probably a reference to the myth of Paul’s death and its new interpretation: if McCartney, walking barefoot, is still alive, then Lennon, also without shoes on the cover, will live too. Here, he was swapped with Lennon.

“I didn’t think John deserved to die because he started this band,” Kibalchich says.

The cover is zoomed in a bit.

Back cover

The back cover has the Antrop and Santa LTD logos:

Inner Sleeve

The inner sleeve, like other Riga records, has an engraving with a view of Riga — the album was produced at a factory in Riga:

Soviet Abbey Road Rarity

There were production problems and Tropillo and Kibalchich were in disputes, so the print run was small. Now, that record is pretty rare, and a copy on eBay in 2024 went for a whopping $420.

Non-Antrop Abbey Road bootlegs and labels

Labels of three different Russian Abbey Road pressings: Antrop, Tashkent Plant (from 1991), Belarusian Beloton:

Only the Antrop version has a different cover. The other two simply copy the original cover with poorer quality.

Abbey Road in the USSR and Russia

In the Soviet Union, the song Something was sung in english, while Come Together was often distorted and became a meme.

© 2024 Artur Netsvetaev, interviews with Nikolai Kibalchich, Yuri Trifonov.

Things like homophonic translation, soramimi and Soviet mondegreens are very interesting. Especially Soviet mishearings of English songs. This article aims to tell the history and evolution of mishearings (mondegreens) in the Soviet Union as reflected in Beatles lyrics and titles, based on every documented source I could locate.

In the mid-1950s, foreign rock ‘n’ roll music started to reach the Soviet Union through illegal radio broadcasts. In Leningrad, you could usually pick up broadcasts from Finland, France, or Eastern Europe. Later, you could even pick up the BBC, even though the signals were often jammed and weak. But you could still hear and tape the BBC. At the same time, “bone records” (music cut onto used X-ray film) and the first official foreign vinyl records started to circulate.

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Young musicians didn’t just listen to Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles; they recorded the songs on reel-to-reel machines, tried to learn the chords, and wrote down the English lyrics by ear and often misinterpret lyrics. They would then practice with their bands and perform at schools or cafes. Up until the early 1970s, it was legal for Soviet “amateur” rock groups to perform in English.

Official translations and Soviet adaptations of Beatles songs

From the late 1960s onward, people started translating foreign songs into Russian. It was common to print song titles in Russian. For an official performance or a release on the state label Melodiya, a full Russian-language lyric was required.

Melodiya officially changed titles to Russian since 1950s. Alexei Yurchak in his research “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation” (2005, p. 190) wrote about it:

This one “bourgeois” track was commonly renamed and its attribution changed, to make it appear more appropriate for the Soviet listeners. For example, in the 1950s, Melodiia renamed the U.S. jazz composition “American patrol” as “On Guard” (Na zastave) to avoid the word “American.”

The same applied to text translations.. These “translations” were equirhythmic but usually became loose adaptations with simpler, lighter arrangements. There were some times when they let bands play in English, like when Uriah Heep’s “Sunrise” and “July Morning,” and the Beatles’ “Something” were sung in English in the 70s. But most of the time, Soviet bands sang in Russian, and their versions were very different from the original songs.

A Few Soviet Covers Examples

Many musicians who performed Beatles covers on stage left the USSR in the 1970s.

There is nothing surprising about the adaptation of popular English-language songs in West Europe. For example, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da was also covered with different lyrics in Bulgaria and Poland:

Beyond just making it more accessible to listeners—and projecting the officially approved “Soviet” character—these censored localizations made sure that the new Soviet lyricists got paid, while the original authors didn’t receive any royalties (in the USSR, until 1973, translations were treated as separate works, so the originals weren’t paid).

There was even a translation-adaptation of “Back to the USSR” printed in Rovesnik magazine and separately, in Songs for Radio and Cinema with sheet music in 1970. But as with “Drive My Car,” the original was pretty much gone, except for the chorus: no Miami, no Ukraine girls, or anything “suspicious.”

Seems like Melodiya itself, with its tradition of translating, censoring, and adapting titles and lyrics, encouraged people to reproduce this habit. So, listeners of the original albums and unofficial English-language covers by the first Soviet beat groups often changed the titles and lyrics—keeping the sound-alike feel but adding a distinctly Soviet-USSR flavor and raw humor.

Russian Homophones or Something More?

I’ve only found a few mentions of this Soviet-English, cross-linguistic phenomenon in the English-speaking world. So I gathered all the data I could find in Russian to make this research and almost full list of Soviet homophones of The Beatles songs.

• I gathered every excerpt, anecdote, and mention I could locate — including folklore, fanzines, interviews, forum posts in english and russian — to assemble a provisional list of Soviet homophones of Beatles lyrics.
• I cross-checked each homophone with print archives, fan memoirs, and contemporary Soviet youth publications when possible.
• Given how rarely this phenomenon has been studied formally, this compilation offers a starting base for further researches.

The general idea of mondegreensworks within a single language (“a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning”), while the Japanese term soramimirefers to foreign language mishearings. I think the Soviet habit of changing English song titles is an example of cross-language homophones—words that sound alike but are spelled differently and can mean different things. The closest existing term is homophonic translation.

It’s not like regular cross-linguistic homophones (two words from different languages that sound the same but mean different things—basically, a false friend), where it seems like Soviet homophonic song titles picked up extra layers of meaning and satiric context that were obvious to natives. It’s tricky to explain the abstract associative link between some of these distorted titles and their originals or a Soviet life. Still, most titles are just absurd and funny, but they don’t really mean anything, similar to Internet memes. Confirmed examples appear in The Times and PRX; broader lists persist as oral folklore.

This probably started happening in the USSR even before rock ‘n’ roll came around: Glenn Miller’s 1941 “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was shortened to “ChuCha” (“Чуча”) in Russian. Then, in the 1950s, stilyagi (Soviet hipsters) picked it up. Phrases like “Byla b baba Dunya, ona b dala” (alt.: “baba Lyuba” — “If Lyuba were here, she would let me…”) circulated in different versions, mapped either onto Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula” or Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti.”

At last, Soviet homophones caught on all over the place in the 1960s, along with the first records and tape-to-tape copies of English songs. A lot of listeners didn’t speak English, so they chose Russian words that sounded similar and fit the original meter instead of a precise translation. This was because the lyrics had been changed over and over again on the tape, and they weren’t as clear.

Beatles Mondegreens in the USSR (Soviet Russia)

The Beatles were most often subjected to “folk” adaptations, as the most popular foreign band. (By the way, on Melodiya’s first record featuring “Girl” in 1967, the label even credited “English folk tune, The Beatles quartet.”)

At the same time, in 60-s and 70s, “recording studios” appear in the Soviet Union — shops where you can “legally” record various songs on flexible discs, instead of buying x-rays:

For a long time, from the beginning of their existence, sound-recording studios were recording music onto transparent or one-color celluloid records. Sometimes – even onto X-ray film. Later, photographs covered with a celluloid layer began to be used.

In most cases (if not always), sound-recording studios didn’t indicate either the title of the song or the artist on cut records and postcards-records. The owners of these flexible records and postcards, if desired, signed them themselves. Some people knew what they ordered and purchased. Some had no clue – just liked the music. Therefore, such music lovers indicated by hand, by Cyrillic or Latin letters, the song(s) and artist(s) as they thought or as they heard. For this reason, you can find absolutely incredible titles, which sometimes don’t allow understanding at once what kind of music is recorded on the record or postcard-record.

List of popular Beatles homophones in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s

The following Soviet cases of homophonic translation probably came around the 1960s–70s:

• Can’t Buy Me Love — “Throw the crowbar to the woman” (Kin’ Bab’e Lom) — Кинь бабе лом. Sometimes extends to “…Manya Combain Vela” from Money Can’t Buy Me Love (Maria drove the combine harvester). Popular homophone, which has become established in the slang and folklore of the USSR.
• Yellow Submarine — “Marina ate soup” (Yela Sup Marina) — Ела суп Марина (Marina is a female name). This one’s probably the second well-known, but there were so many variants that it felt like every family had its own. Submarine got rhymed with Somali, Margarine, and Pomorin (a Bulgarian toothpaste brand).
• Drive My Car — “Drink my kaif (transliteration + slang for a high/buzz)” —  Дринк май кайф. A lesser-known distortion, but one mentioned by music critic and journalist Artemy Troitsky as well as the first one.
• What Goes On — “Here is the lawn” (Vot Gazon) — Вот газон. Variant: “Here’s the lawn—take it out!” (“вот газон — вынимай!”). It’s present in the memories of many Beatles fans and has been easily found on internet blogs since at least 2003 on the Beatles’ forums with reference to journalist Vladimir Ilyinsky, and in personal blogs.
• Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da — “Pay and own” (op-la-ti, ob-la-dai) — Оплати — обладай. Also less well known, but often found in blogs and forums for Beatles fans. Widely remembered; no period print cite found yet. Considering the song’s earlier appearance in 1968 and its popularity in the USSR (because of it’s simplicity), this is entirely possible.

Additional Misheardings From the USSR & Ukraine

• Any Time At All — “And don’t give me TNT” (Ee Ne Dai Mne Tol) — И не дай мне тол
• Hey Jude — “I walk” (Khah-zhoo) — Хожу
• Come Together — “Конь Тугеза” (Kon To-ge-za) — A horse by name Togeza (may be a modern intentional pun*
• Love Me Do — “Forehead stained in honey” (Lob v me-doo) — Лоб в меду
• It Won’t Be Long — “And now everything is white” (covered with snow) (Ee vot be-lo) — И вот, бело
• Ram On — “Repair process” (Re-mont) — Ремонт
• Let It Be — A bee is flying (Le-teet bee) — Летит би or in Russian-English version Летит bee
• Let It Be — “A beatle is flying” (Le-teet beetl) — Летит битл
• Little Child — “Alycha” (Ah-ly-chah) — Алыча or Cherry plum
• Baby’s In Black — “I’ll find vodka” (Vod-kee nai-doo) — Водки найду (after the lyric’s line “what can I do?“, and later after Smokie’s, “What Can I Do?). Widely remembered across russian fan communities.
• Yesterday — “Eat People” (Yesh L’udei) — Ешь людей (with some stretching — with a certain, unclear pronunciation) (some other mentioned Esti Dai — distorted “Let me Eat”)

Old Beatles fans and collectors Vadim Legkokonets and Andrei Lukanin documented these homophones from Soviet Russia and Ukraine in the 1960s and 1970s in their article. Despite Andrei and Vadim’s credibility, I believe “Kon To-ge-za” may be a modern-era homophone pun because I haven’t found any mention of it before 2006. That’s when the Russian band Bugotak made a parody cover of “Come Together” with the words “Kon To-ge-zyi” (an adjective describing the color or character of a horse). After that, their version became widely known on the internet.

They mention other intentional “paraphrases” of Beatles song titles:

• Lady Madonna— “Baba Matrona” — Баба Матрона (Matrona is a female name, often associated with the orthodox church)
• Day Tripper — “Daily Gonorrhea” (Dnevnoi Tripper) — Дневной Триппер
• She’s A Woman — “Vona zh moya baba” (direct translation to Ukrainian)
• Strawberry Fields Forever — Bulldozer (from the line in the song “nothing is real,” which sounds similar to the russian expression “na fig izryl” [Why did you dig that up?]).

As you can see, the range of errors was quite wide and varied across regions. Some of them have been known and confirmed for a long time, for example Kin’ Babe Lom is quoted even in The Times, and by cultural expert and member of the Kino group Alexander Lipnitsky in memoirs: “I remember Viktor [Tsoi] telling me how he and Pyotr showed up at a Beatles fan gathering and started singing …Kin’ Bab’e Lom… (Can’t Buy Me Love). The die-hard Beatlemaniacs were seriously offended. There was a crowd of hardcore fans at a Beatles anniversary, and Viktor told me the story, laughing.” (from Viktor Tsoi. Poems. Documents. Memories, A. Zhitinsky, Marianna Tsoi). Yela Sup Marina mondegreen is also known worldwide.

Lyric Parodies Based on Homophones

Artemy Troitsky noted that fans didn’t stop at titles—they jokingly “translated” lyrics, in part or in full:

“Soviet hippies inherited from the stilyagi a habit of not so much creating their own material as reworking name-brand Western originals to fit local tastes. Since the Beatles were much more visible than everyone else, people reworked them most actively. You Never Give me Your Money’ sounded like this:

Ty ne davala mine groshi
Ty ne davala mine teply boty
Tai vot teper’ ya dyozhe prostudilsya
Tai pomer. (roughly Ukrainian)

Back-translation: “You never gave me any money / you never gave me warm boots / and now I’ve caught a terrible cold / and died.”

This version of “You Never Give Me Your Money” is in the same rhythm as the original, but it uses Ukrainian stylization for comic effect. It’s likely that this and other funny “translations” came from accidentally coined homophonic titles or choruses—local memes.

For example, “Yela sup Marina” (“Marina ate soup”) became the subject of Dmitry Shagin’s paintings riffing on “Yellow Submarine” and one of his songs, although other Russian lyrics with the same refrain phrase exist—and we don’t know who wrote them (Incidentally, Joseph Brodsky translated YS into Russian around 1969 for the magazine “Kostyor”).

In the Russian adaptation, Yellow Submarine almost always turns into something like Bandersnatch—everyone translates it in their own way, and often only hints of the original text remain. It’s just natural folklore.

List of Non-Beatles USSR Homophones In The Late 70s & 80s

Although homophones and memes associated with the Beatles remained, new homophones from late 1970s pop and disco music gradually joined them:

• Шизгара — a distortion of “She’s got it,” from Shocking Blue’s “Venus” (the chorus).
  Became a big Soviet and Russian meme and part of the music of Soviet rock bands. For example, the song “Secret Sign” by the band Chaif includes the lines “I’ll close the shutters, light all the candles. I’ll start up the Shizgaru and pass the evening”. Shizgara even had a website shizgara.su and used by official newspapers (wikipedia).
• Варвара жарит кур — “Varvara roasts chicken” (Varvara zharit kur) — from Boney M., “Daddy Cool.”
  Some recall the opening couplet morphing into: “They suddenly burned the village down; Varvara’s roasting chicken!” For the record, on a Melodiya pressing the very title “Daddy Cool” was translated as “Spokoynyy otets” (“Calm Father”). Known worldwide.
• Водки найду — “I’ll find vodka” (Vodki naidu) — Smokie, “What Can I Do?”.
  Very popular meme, partly because Melodiya released a licensed Smokie record with this song, and partly because there were also a parody lyric, and a russian translation by The Happy Guys band. Smokie manager John Wagstaff in 2012 refers to it: “Their number, What Can I Do, is especially popular,” he said. “I’ve even heard that Russian students turned it into a drinking song called Vodka I Do.”
• Пили дрова — “Saw wood” (Pili drova) — Space, “Deliverance.”

Homophones Beyond Songs

The “Soviet adaptation” even extended to album titles and musicians’ names. Fans called Lennon “Lenin” and McCartney “Makarenko.” It’s named after a famous Soviet educator and writer, as Artemy Troitsky recalls.

One user on the beatles.ru forum also mentioned:

“In ’67 people bragged that they had not only Revolver but also an avtomat (an automatic gun)—by which we meant the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath!”

This is a great example of homophony and the revolver/automat wordplay, and it also shows the rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones and the habit of comparing their recent albums.

Another Beatles fan remembered in 2006 how his friend got the nickname after the Uriah Heep:

One student runs up and shouts, “Guys, I found the record…I don’t know how to translate the band’s name, but these guys are definitely HIPPIES!” The student’s name was Yuri, and that’s how he earned his nickname that day.

The joke here is in the similarity between the name Yuri and Uriah, and the connection to the record (probably the Uriah Heep album) with Heep / Hippie rhyme.

Why & How Homophones Appeared in the Soviet Union

There are a few serious studies out there on homophonic translation in general, and I’d point to a recent German paper as a good example. It looks like knowing the source language can help you avoid mishearing, but having a more diverse vocabulary in your native language might actually lead to more creative reinterpretations.

It’s clear that similar effects happen in every country and language that comes into contact with another culture—it’s just how our brains work. In Germany, they call these cases the “Agathe Bauer” effect, after the way listeners heard the intro to Snap’s “The Power” (“I’ve got the power”) as “Agathe Bauer.” In the Netherlands, people started using the term “Mama Appelsap” (“mom, apple juice”) after Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” where “Mama say mama sa mama koo sa” was heard a lot as “Mama appelsap.”

But the Iron Curtain, the distance between Russian and English languages, and internal censorship clearly shaped how homophones developed in the USSR. It’s not like regular misunderstandings or “false friends.” Soviet-English homophones are more like abstract, absurd and ironic local memes. But these memes made English-language songs by the Beatles, Shocking Blue, and others feel more relatable to Soviet listeners.

Beyond the obvious—like limited English proficiency and poor audio quality of early recordings—there are a few other factors that likely drove the rise of cross-language homophones and misinterpreted titles for foreign songs:

1. The humor and wordplay of musicians and early translators

Back in the 1960s, Western music wasn’t something everyone could easily access. People with good enough English—like linguistics students, sailors, poets, future diplomats—and a lot of music fans who studied in specialized English schools, could intentionally misinterpret familiar songs for laughs, creating early memes.

There’s a certain duality here. On the one hand, musicians, poets, and artists chose to distance themselves from politics and focus on creativity, giving themselves room to express themselves and play around with different forms, which was not really accepted in the Soviet Union (Alexei Yurchak writes about this, for example).

Despite that, they basically did the same thing as the official Melodiya label, adapting and censoring foreign songs to make them more Soviet and “their own.”

2. A semi-underground rock-culture

There wasn’t an outright ban on rock, but rock ‘n’ roll performances were sort of underground and people didn’t really like them. Also, there were no sanctions for amateur performances, unlike illegal concerts for money—and the amusing absurd titles seemed extremely unprofessional.

The Soviet government didn’t like Western music and lifestyle, so Soviet hippies, musicians, and fans of Western culture had to hide foreign influences as Soviet, change foreign titles, and make up their own language that the police and KGB couldn’t understand. By the 1980s, when there was more pressure on rock music, the people organizing illegal concerts came up with even more abstract codes for selling tickets.

3. Moving beyond just covers

They started out by performing English songs as close to the originals as possible. Then, Soviet musicians would translate and analyze the lyrics, and then adapt them—loading them with new meanings that made sense in the Soviet/Russian context—until they ultimately began writing songs in Russian that sounded just like the originals. This shift started in the early 1970s with the appearance of Aquarium, Mashina Vremeni (who also started with Beatles covers in the ’60s), Sankt-Peterburg, and later Zoopark—bands that built a bridge between the English tradition and the new Soviet rock.

This version is confirmed, for example, by Lithuanian magazine “Rock Partner” (No. 1, 1990, Robbie Maxwell) in an article about the birth of rock music in the USSR:

Until a certain point in time, the attitude toward language in rock music was clear: The Beatles sang in English, so all our bands diligently copied the brilliant originals. Occasionally, Russian-language songs appeared in some bands’ programs, but they were usually jokes or parodies.

The first step was to exploit the phonetic similarities between English and Russian phrases or words. Sometimes, the so-called “fish,” a meaningless phrase that mimicked the rhythmic structure of the English verse, was used as the “key” phrase of the Russian-language version. Given that the vast majority of listeners and performers had only a vague understanding of English, this practice was understandable and perhaps inevitable, although it obviously had no future.

Unlike with bootleg cover adaptations, where artists re-created the original artwork but added Soviet elements on purpose, it seems that homophones, name distortions, and playful “translations” of songs probably first came about among linguistics students, musicians, and artists. These were people who didn’t always understand the original lyrics or couldn’t make them out because of bad recording quality. But sometimes they naively and intuitively combined foreign song titles and musicians’ names with Soviet references and terms, choosing words that simply sounded good.

A lot of musicians wrote songs in a similar way. For example, Brian Eno often sang nonsense over a new melody until finished lyrics appeared, and sometimes that nonsense stayed in the final version because it sounded better. Eno remarked on a 1980 interview on Berkeley’s KPFA-FM:

“It works from sounds to words and from words to meaning… quite the other way around from the way people normally think lyrics are written,”

4. Accidental domestication by listeners — meme development by musicians

For a lot of people, these homophonic “translations” were just a way to make English songs more relatable to native Russian and Soviet listeners. They weren’t really planned, they just happened. Since they didn’t speak enough English, fans sang the words they thought they heard (In fact, The Beatles and other Western bands encouraged people to learn English) Even after they learned a song’s real meaning, their version often stuck as a meme and kept spreading. Song titles were often shortened to a convenient form.

As audio players got better in 70s and foreign rock albums became more available in the USSR, mishearing variants multiplied, and some adaptations turned intentionally ironic and funny.

Memes that started out as accidents turned into full-on translation adaptations. Just like Grebenshchikov & Aquarium borrowed direct quotes from Bowie and Dylan when writing Russian lyrics, Shagin pieced together his own “Yela-Soup-Marina” using Mitki memes and lore.

It’s possible that what started as accidental homophones turned into intentional homophonic-like translations and eventually became the lyrics of Soviet rock songs, filled with references to their English sources.

Sources

Western media / context

• The Guardian: Bone music – Soviet bootleg records pressed on X-rays
• The Times: Ben Macintyre on misunderstandings caused by mishearing
• The World: The spread of mondegreens
• The Guardian: The Beatles in Russia (2003)
• The Guardian: Smokie’s secret Kremlin gig
• AV Club: Misheard translated lyrics are a global phenomenon

Academic / analytical

• Alexei Yurchak — Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton University Press)
• PMC article: mishearing / linguistics / psychology
• Article by Andrey Lukanin and Vadim Legkokonets

Primary Soviet/Russian fan culture

• Diversant Daily archive (2005) (Artemy Troitsky)
• Beatles.ru forum thread 1
• Beatles.ru forum thread 2
• Beatles.ru forum thread 3
• LiveJournal blog post
• Gazeta.ru archive (2006)
• Ex-Pressa samizdat: Rokpartner
• Kulemzin Poetry website

Special cases / curiosities

• Shizgara.su: Venus (archived)
• Wikipedia: Venus (song)
• Brian Eno interview at Internet Archive

This article is also available at archive.org at the CC Attribution 4.0 International license and on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/17164121

If you have any other examples of homophones or homophonic translations in the context of English-language rock music in the USSR, please leave a comment here or email them to [email protected].

Recording Process

Boris Grebenshchikov*:

When you want something with your whole being, not just consciously, it comes true. In the spring and summer of 1981, we recorded what I had always loved most: an album of pure, irresponsible absurdity, in a studio that quite literally fell from the sky into our laps.

We wrote half the songs on the tram on the way to the studio and rehearsed and arranged them on the steps of the Young Technicians’ Club while waiting for the sound engineer, famous for being hours late. To his credit, he treated our nonsense with total professionalism. He even played the recorder on “Misha” and respected our uncompromising devotion to the illogical. In The Triangle—as it became known; the actual “title” was just the symbol, never spoken aloud—the level of group creativity was unusually high. Everyone seemed to be tuned to the same frequency.

It was during this time that Aquarium first met Sergei Kuryokhin. A friend suggested inviting him to improve our musical and arranging abilities, which was a wise idea. He happily sprinkled his keyboard brilliance across the songs, had everyone play the kazoo on “The Lieutenant,” and stayed with us for years, drifting in and out. Much of Aquarium simply wouldn’t have happened without him.

We already knew Olga Pershina from Vasin’s Beatles’ Birthdays. I don’t recall why we invited her, but she showed up and not only sang backup vocals but also contributed as a composer (“Two Tractor Drivers”). Even Seva sang a solo, which was unusual for him. Sadly, the original recording of “Crookedness,” sung by Dyusha in the style of Ernst Busch, was lost. It slowly morphed into the album version later, while I sat in a side room working on Count Garcia.

I carried this masterpiece to Moscow with a trembling heart, only to be told unanimously by the experts that no one would ever listen to it. History proved them wrong; 85% of Russia came to love Aquarium because of “The Triangle.” Since then, I’ve learned to take criticism with a smile.

Vsevolod Gakkel:

At first, we tried recording some of the songs we were playing at the time. Since we had no idea what the new album was supposed to be, we started recording songs that Bob Grebenshchikov was writing on the spot. We hadn’t heard any of the songs before and had never played them live, so we made the arrangements right there in the studio. That became the album Triangle.

Tropillo had managed to obtain a stereo tape machine from Melodiya, the Soviet state record label, as well as a Studer eight-channel mixing desk. These additions brought us to an entirely new level of recording.

It was probably our most “alive” session—everyone was engaged and eager to play. Friends would drop in.

Reel Tape Cover Art

Andrei Usov designed the artwork, as well as almost all of Aquarium’s albums and several for Zoopark. Triangle was the first attempt by Usov and Grebenshchikov to experiment with design. They wanted to create something mysterious that would intrigue listeners.

The artwork was always created after the album was recorded. Initially, the titles and designs were fairly random, but gradually, they became more closely tied to the music itself.

“Someone gave Grebenshchikov a book like that—30 by 30 centimeters, LP-sized,” Usov recalls. It was a collection of album covers. The level of music was represented by bands like the Grateful Dead. I must have looked through those books dozens of times. Something always stuck in my mind and sparked new ideas. Later, I saw more when I started buying magazines and studying how layouts were designed. And we constantly received records from France—that was a kind of school in itself, a fascinating education. That’s what I was raised on.”

It all culminated in a photo shoot in the courtyard next to the Young Technicians’ Club and inside the studio itself. Vsevolod Gakkel climbed onto a window and hid behind the curtain. Meanwhile, Grebenshchikov put on a broken reflector he found on the floor and began moving toward the window. After considering how it looked through the lens, he said: “Let’s shoot!”

Full Album

* From memoirs «A brief report on 16 years of sound recording», 1996

Andrey Usov’s interview © Artur Netsvetaev

This text is meant as extracurricular reading for those who listen to Aquarium and—for whatever reason—want to know how what they’re hearing was recorded. It is by no means “memoirs,” “recollections,” or even a “literary work.” At best, it’s entertainment for specialists; at worst, it’s just our own self-indulgence—and, strictly speaking, it makes no sense at all. Perhaps that’s exactly why it came into being: true creativity, as I once heard, has neither reason nor meaning. It simply grows—like trees.

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The chronicle begins in 1980, because what came before was a time of unformed mythology: wandering through the engineering castles of this world with a guitar, a flute, and a cello. It was a period never really captured and impossible to reflect adequately. The recordings from those years belong less to musicology than to ethnography—they are documents of another form of life. In other words, they can be studied, but not listened to. Back then, the value of music lay not in being heard, but in being played.

Our appearance at the Tallinn festival, and the acquaintances that followed—first with Mashina Vremeni, later with Artemy Troitsky—led to the Tbilisi concert and the start of another phase of life. That is where this story truly begins.

I should add that I grew up listening to records and radio, and of course rock ’n’ roll was, for me, a magical combination of sounds emerging from a loudspeaker. It was a purely religious revelation—like the burning bush—that forever erased the bland world of my parents, or rather, my bland perception of it. There were no living beings—no musicians—hidden behind it. Poorly duplicated photographs of the Beatles, traded in the schoolyard during recess, had only a theoretical connection to the miracle that resurrected the dead in I Want To Hold Your Hand.

That’s why our attempts to create something that could be listened to as a recording began long before we learned to hold the guitar the right way around. The Temptation of St. Aquarium, recorded in 1973, is a direct illustration of this. Later came The Parables of Count Diffusor and others—but these still fell far short of what we longed for. We rehearsed, wrote songs, played concerts, and—without realizing it—were simply waiting for a miracle…

The Blue Album

In the summer of 1980, out of nowhere appeared a vaguely familiar figure named Andrei Tropillo, who said, “I’ll help you.”

The first sign of that help was a homemade mixing console in a rough wooden box, which he hauled into Sewa’s apartment (since there was nowhere else to store it). An auspicious beginning—the thing looked more like a partisan bomb than a piece of studio gear.

By late autumn, Tropillo had hypnotically convinced the old lady at the entrance desk that we were “pioneers” and smuggled us into the Young Technicians’ Club on the Okhta, where he ran the tape-recording workshop. Fanfares played, a choir of illegal angels sang—it was the dawn of a New Era.

Once we had access to the studio, we first tried to record Marina and –30, but by then the era of heavy-electric Aquarium had probably passed. Our Tbilisi-period drummer Zhenya Guberman and mystical avant-gardist Sasha Aleksandrov (Fagot) had vanished into thin air, and Aquarium reverted to its original quartet: Dyusha, Feinstein, Gakkel, and me. We spat on “professionalism,” sat down in the studio, and began recording what was simply the most fun to record—new songs that no one had ever heard.

Railway Water was written on the Leningrad–Solnechnoye train (in Solnechnoye we managed to rent a stove-heated room for the whole winter—there was no housing in the city). Ryzhy Chort, temporarily migrated to Leningrad, blew his harmonica and kept the anarchy at proper levels. Tropillo worked selflessly ten, sometimes thirty hours at a stretch. To my surprise, Dyusha took up the role of electric guitarist, laying down the solo on The Dog and his own Strange Objects, which turned the record from a collection of songs into a living being.

Mikhail was just then mastering percussion (I think it was around this time he discovered that if you filled an empty beer can with a mix of grains and sealed it with a band-aid, you had yourself a surprisingly good-sounding—and rather stylish—shaker). Sewa, though ill for most of the sessions, still managed to inject a hefty dose of psychedelia into The Plane. He played while the rest of us fought for the chance to twist the knobs of the studio’s lone effects unit—an effect that would play no small role in our later recordings and in the first albums of Kino.

In truth, this was the first proper underground Russian album: the songs were recorded in a studio, arranged in order, and the photo cover was glued by hand with “Moment” adhesive onto boxes wrapped in blue paper. Out of a band of idealistic wanderers, Aquarium became real—and therefore, a true myth.

The Triangle

When you want something—not consciously, but with your whole being—it comes true. In the spring and summer of 1981, in a studio that quite literally fell from the sky into our laps, we recorded what I had always loved most: an album of pure, irresponsible absurdity.

Half the songs were written on the tram on the way to the studio, then rehearsed and arranged on the steps of the Young Technicians’ Club while we waited for the sound engineer, who was famous for being hours late. To his credit, he treated our nonsense with total professionalism, even played recorder on Misha, and respected our uncompromising devotion to the illogical. In The Triangle (as it became known—the actual “title” was just the symbol, never spoken aloud), the level of group creativity was unusually high. Everyone seemed to be tuned to the same frequency.

It was on The Triangle that Aquarium first met Sergei Kuryokhin. A friend had suggested inviting him to raise our musical and arranging level—a wise idea. The Captain came, happily sprinkled his keyboard brilliance across the songs, made everyone play kazoo on The Lieutenant, and then stayed with us for years, drifting in and out. Much of Aquarium simply wouldn’t have happened without him.

We already knew Olga Pershina (later Perry—what she goes by now, I don’t know) from Vasin’s Beatles’ Birthdays. I can’t remember why we invited her, but she showed up—and not only sang backing vocals, but contributed as a composer (Two Tractor Drivers). Even Sewa, against his usual habits, sang a solo. Sadly, the original recording of Crookedness—sung by Dyusha in the style of Ernst Busch—was lost. Later it slowly morphed into the album version, while I sat in a side room working on Count Garcia.

I carried this masterpiece to Moscow with a trembling heart—only to be told unanimously by the experts that nobody would ever listen to it. History proved them wrong: 85% of Russia came to love Aquarium precisely because of The Triangle. Since then, I’ve learned to take critical judgments with a smile.

Electricity

The first side—the live side—was recorded at a concert in the circus of the town of Gori (incidentally, Stalin’s birthplace), held as part of the unforgettable Tbilisi-80. At first we were banned from the festival completely; then, for reasons unknown, they suddenly asked us to play in Gori. By then we were already black sheep with nothing to lose, so we decided to have the time of our lives.

On keyboards was Latvian composer Mārtiņš Brauns from the sympathetic band Sipoli (together, they and we formed the “punk” faction in Tbilisi, for which Aquarium was crowned in one Finnish newspaper as the “godfathers of Soviet punk”). During The Blues of the Pig in the Ears, Dima “Ryzhy Chort” Gusev appeared in the circus arena with his harmonica, and drummer Guberman was suddenly joined by Michael Kordyukov, who came down from the mountains out of nowhere.

The concert was filmed by the Finns, and the audio track was secretly copied in Moscow thanks to a friendly Chilean cameraman. Eternal gratitude to him—and to all of them.

The studio side was recorded at Tropillo’s, during the peak of our reggae & dub experiments. From Tropillo’s legendary effects unit we squeezed far more than it was ever designed to produce. Unfortunately, songs like The Amateur we had no idea how to put on tape properly (the same problem would soon repeat with Rock ’n’ Roll Is Dead). On a couple of tracks, guitarist Volodya Kozlov (Union of Rock Music Lovers—you can also hear him on Lieutenant Ivanov from The Triangle) lent us a hand. This was because The Triangle, Acoustics, and Electricity were all being recorded at the same time, and which song we worked on depended entirely on our mood that day.

On drums (everywhere except The Wonderful Amateur) was Alexander Kondrashkin, whom we’d first heard at some jazz-avant-garde concert and happily invited to play with us. For a while we even rehearsed at his place. Rehearsals shaped much of Aquarium’s signature sound. Since we never had a proper space for electric rehearsals, we would gather at someone’s apartment; the bass was usually plugged into a radio (sometimes even into a TV—since, alas, bass amps were rare), and drums were replaced with whatever household items were handy. Naturally, rehearsals quickly turned into tea-drinking sessions and wide-ranging philosophical debates. If anyone managed to remember the chord changes of a song, they kept it to themselves. As a result, the band was never very tight—but it was always close-knit. That’s how Aquarium as a way of life became a professional reality.

And I note with some irony: that’s still how it works today. Modern Western science is powerless to explain this anomaly. But, as Mike rightly observed, you can’t fight karma.

Taboo

At last we decided to record a proper electric album—the songs we were actually playing live. Early ’82 was marked by the first concert of a truly electric Aquarium with Lyapin and Pyotr (the recording of that show has since been released as Aroks and Shter). For a time, we were even granted official permission to perform, which meant the concert season had opened. But that didn’t stop us from recording.

Lacking proper keyboards, we hammered office tacks into the hammers of a piano. Here—as in much of Radio Africa—the arrangements, and to some extent the choice of musicians, owed a great deal to Sergei Kuryokhin. Working with him was never really “work,” but sheer pleasure. Around the same time, we recorded Exercises with Vladimir Chekasin and our own Subway Culture. I think the rest of Aquarium were a little uneasy about this alliance—but what could they do?

Kuryokhin frowned at Lyapin’s “too straight-up rock” guitar; Lyapin, for his part, would have happily played louder, longer, and with less piano clatter. As for me—like the cartoon cat Leopold—I just wanted everyone to live in peace, and above all, for the album to come out fantastically well. More than once I had to escape the studio tensions out onto the balcony—where, during the Taboo sessions, I ended up writing Rock ’n’ Roll Is Dead. But when that strange combination clicked (and in truth, both of them respected each other’s musicianship deeply), it worked 100 percent.

It’s a pity the tape ran out during the recording of Sons of Silent Days—that was the only thing that stopped us. And of course, to balance the whole picture, Taboo closes with a Tolkien-inspired coda: Radamaerl.

Acoustics

This album captures the songs Aquarium played at acoustic home concerts between 1978 and 1986. At the concerts, of course, they sounded much more immediate and raw—but on tape, each song uses only the instruments it really needs.

At the shows, everyone always played at once, creating that cheerful chaos so typical of Aquarium at the time. The recordings themselves were made in parallel with The Triangle and Electricity during the spring, summer, and fall of 1981. A few tracks, though, were recorded earlier, during Tropillo’s first heroic attempt to record Aquarium in the very heart of the enemy—right inside Melodiya (Ivanov and others).

Thus the guiding principle of Aquarium was set for years to come: if there’s a studio, the best use of time is simply to spend all your free hours there, and something interesting will happen on its own. In fact, most of our best recordings were always made outside of any “official work,” purely for fun. Unconceptual, as some might call it.

Radio Africa

Two summers had already gone by with our mass night-time bike rides around the then-popular resort town of Solnechnoye (see The Music of Silver Spokes). That’s the spirit in which the album began—first at our beloved Young Technicians’ Club, and then, somehow, Tropillo managed to cut a deal for us to use an MCI recording truck that had come to the Philharmonic. At night, hiding from the watchful eyes of the police suspiciously observing the truck from across the street, we slipped into our very first 16-track studio and brought our dreams to life. And the dream was to make a full-blooded, richly varied, positive record. Which is exactly what happened.

Here were Kuryokhin and Igor Butman with their jazz, our take on reggae, reversed guitars and drums, a choir of Shaolin monks, and Lyapin—finally on the same wavelength with us. Altogether it created just the effect we had hoped for.

All sorts of people had a hand in recording Africa: Michael Kordyukov (Moon Time, The Snake, Morning Snow), Zhenya Guberman (Captain Africa), Grinya (Alexander Grishchenko, the bassist Kuryokhin had brought in during the Tabooperiod—hear him on The Art of Being Humble). Lyapin’s then-wife Lilia sang backing vocals on Boy Yevgraf. Sewa played bass on both Boy Yevgraf and Vana Hoya. Even Grisha Sollogub of Strange Games showed up to record harmonica for Vana Hoya—but the harp clashed hopelessly with the track, and with heavy hearts we had to scrap it.

It was during Radio Africa that Tit appeared for the first time. When no one could manage to lay down a simple driving bassline for Moon Time, Dyusha remembered an old bassist acquaintance, tracked him down, and asked for help. Alexander walked quietly into the truck, listened to the track, and nailed the bass on the very first take. I was stunned—and started thinking.

Moon Time and Snow I wrote while sneaking home from work (at the time I was guarding the garage of some public baths, but at night I’d slip home to sleep). Boy Yevgraf was written in a taxi with Tsoi and Marianna—we were on our way to their place, late and carrying a sack of red wine, where Kuryokhin was already waiting.

When the recording was finished, we mixed it all night, wrapped up at ten in the morning, and drove off to Vyborg to play a festival. That’s where Tit received a formal invitation to join Aquarium—and enthusiastically agreed. To mark the occasion, everyone at the festival got drunk and spent the night skinny-dipping in the lakes and fjords of Monrepos Park (if I recall correctly, right in the center of Vyborg). As far as I remember, at that time it was practically comme il faut to walk around naked in public.

Ichthyology

At this point Aquarium had once again been strictly banned from public performance. Our collective response was to promise to play more concerts, and better ones. Blacklisted and unlicensed, we played in strangers’ apartments, which meant the instrumentation bordered on ascetic. (To be fair, the theater Litsedei wasn’t put off by our untouchable status and let us play a series of shows there—the second half of the album reflects that.)

The only way to record Fly, My Angel, Fly was live in concert—no studio microphone could withstand the cello storm that came with that song.

The Day of Silver

Strange as it may sound, the roots of Day of Silver partly go back to the composer Glinka. Film director Alexander Sokurov, a friend of ours at the time, suggested we record a few Glinka romances for one of his films (which never materialized). We were stunned and began to wrestle with the impossible task. Analyzing Glinka’s method of composition, I was floored by his harmonic freedom. “Aha,” I thought. “If he can do it, why can’t we?”

That spring, Sewa and I spent weeks at his place writing songs. I would come in with an idea, and he wouldn’t let me settle for the simplest version. Naturally, by the next meeting I wanted to bring something that would impress him—and he still wouldn’t let me rest on that either. In this back-and-forth, only what truly struck us both survived—and therefore stuck in memory. (Of course, nothing was ever written down.) Since our musical center of gravity was more or less in the same place, everything moved in the right direction.

When it came time to forge the arrangements, we needed a violinist, and Sewa soon met Sasha Kussul in Saigon [the Leningrad café, not Vietnam]. A better candidate was unimaginable. (There were rumors Sasha was Wagner’s great-grandson—I can’t say if that’s true, but I found him far preferable to any possible ancestor.) Work flowed, tea was endless. At the time, Kussul was simultaneously studying at the Conservatory, playing first violin in the Musical Comedy Theater orchestra, and performing at night along the Neva embankment—yet somehow he still had energy for full rehearsals with us.

There were also more personal, mystical factors that kept us restless: telepathic horses, flying saucers (we saw one right from my rooftop), not to mention the spirit of Peter III, who attacked us in the ruins of his palace (though, in fairness, we had no business going in there—Tropillo dragged us).

Musically, maybe not everything was 100% perfect, but to me this record and this album were the best Aquarium of the 1980s. With Day of Silver and Children of December, what we wanted was finally realized.

Children of December

A continuation of the idyll—the feeling that we could do anything. Kuryokhin rejoined the process, and the recording flowed like a song. Tolkien-like landscapes of Karelia, where I spent the summer (The Village); sheets of metal and an avant-garde detuned guitar (Thirst); a 10th-century Welsh bard, Gwyon ap Gwernach (Cad Goddeu)—all of it, and more, found its way into the album.

By Ino’s “technique of coincidences” [a reference to producer Ino’s improvisational philosophy], the flutes and choirs on Dreams appeared on tape by themselves—we were using un-erased reels from Melodiya [the Soviet state record label]—and, by chance, they fell perfectly into key and in exactly the right spots. At night everyone who could would gather at my place, plotting out what and how we’d record the next day.

The saxophones on 212 were played by Uncle Misha and Lyapin (the lower voice is actually Lyapin’s guitar, run through a guitar synthesizer). The authentic scream on She Can Move is Pyotr’s—his debut as a singer. He also gave us the Korg timbre on Underwater.

And if we’re talking about magic—though the less said about it, the more remains—the strings on The Village are its perfect example.

Ten Arrows

The studio went into renovation (as it turned out—forever), while the songs demanded immediate recording. (Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve always believed that if a song is written, it’s written for today, and storing it away only robs it of its power.) So we had to record everything live at concerts. I still regret we never managed to capture it with harpsichords and sitars, as I had wanted. What we did have was plenty of violin from Sasha Kussul—to whose memory this album is dedicated.

It was, in fact, a fantastic lineup: an acoustic sextet sitting in a semicircle on stage, playing whatever came to mind. The wildest shifts in keys and tempos were no problem for such seasoned players. A good example is The Doors of Grass, usually performed in a completely different way; the version on the album is pure improvisation, something no one was prepared for, but everyone immediately joined in.

The way this lineup came together was just as unusual. After Day of Silver there was no regular concert band left (we were probably banned again), so we played semi-house concerts sometimes with Tit and Kussul, other times with Sewa, Dyusha, and Fan. For reasons long forgotten, these two factions never crossed paths. Then some of our old American friends—who for years had been hauling us sacks of Celtic records—decided to celebrate their wedding in St. Petersburg. For the occasion we agreed to play a concert with an unusually synthetic lineup—everyone together. We played, enjoyed it so much we didn’t want to stop, and immediately began performing in that lineup from then on (I suppose we had been unbanned again).

Equinox

The Young Technicians’ Club studio closed for good (someone finally informed the management that the “recording workshop” was being used by people who were very much not pioneers). The far-sighted Andrei Vladimirovich (Tropillo) had long since removed the master tapes of all the albums, made copies, cleverly disguised those copies as originals, and hidden them in places where, “just in case,” people would be sure to look. Where the real originals ended up—no one even asked.

For a year and a half we had nowhere to record, and only by blackmail did we manage to force Melodiya [the Soviet state record label] to give us studio time (a long but funny story). That’s how we first ended up in an official Soviet studio. The sound engineer treated us with unexpected warmth, but the result still came out heavy and cumbersome. It’s a pity, because the second side was supposed to be completely different; for specific reasons, three key songs were never finished, and their place was taken by Gold, Adelaide, and The Janitors’ Generation—fine songs, but clearly out of place on this album.

For The Tree we needed an accordion, so Gakkel brought in his old friend Sergei Shchurakov (then promptly left the studio halfway through the sessions). After Sasha Kussul’s death, there was a hole where the violin should have been. The new string section became Andrei “Ryusha” Reshetin and Vanya Voropaev—friends of Kussul’s who had once played with him, and for us that was recommendation enough.

The crumhorn orchestra and similar instruments we literally heard on the street and, without hesitation, invited into the studio.

After the haven of the Young Technicians’ Club, working in the citadel of Soviet music was a trial. It was strange to be in a place where everything seemed designed to show maximum disregard both for the musicians and for the people recording them—as if the whole process of recording was heavy labor for the glory of the Motherland (like plowing virgin lands or building the BAM railway), and therefore, by definition, not meant to be easy or pleasant. That invisible aura still hangs over all studios connected with Melodiya—though now it’s joined by the thin atmosphere of post-imperial poverty. But even so, we still somehow managed to enjoy ourselves.

Equinox was the swan song of Aquarium in the 1980s. By then, we no longer fit into one band—there were simply too many of us, with too many different interests and approaches. Sakmarov was right when he called Equinox a hymn. The time had come to move on. It was hard to say—to where. But, unknown to us, the trap was already about to spring.

Radio Silence

Dave and I were sitting by the pool at his house/studio in Los Angeles when he said: “No doubt some critic will write: Stewart ruined what could have been a fine folk-rock album.” He had no idea how right he was.

Russian critics dislike Radio Silence because:

a) it doesn’t sound like Aquarium,

b) it didn’t sweep the charts worldwide, thereby “proving” the supremacy of Soviet rock, and

c) it isn’t remotely “Mitki”-like [Mitki were a Leningrad bohemian art movement].

They’re right. As always, they didn’t understand a thing.

In fact, Radio Silence shattered the self-satisfied Aquarium that had been basking in its own success (since autumn ’86 we’d been moving from stadium to stadium, greeted with ovations as if we’d personally overthrown the Soviet government) and forced us to face the real world. Traditionally, Russia had always imagined for itself a mythical “West” (based on O. Henry, Dickens, and Françoise Sagan), populated it with “Germans,” and lived comfortably in the knowledge that our “Russian Soul” was deeper, higher, closer to God—something the “Germans” could never understand. Since childhood, though, I had preferred not to read fairy tales, but to live in them. That’s exactly what happened. On closer inspection it turned out the “Germans” were nothing but a product of Russian ignorance, the world was very small, and dividing it into “us” and “them” was simply suicidal.

I won’t recount the whole genesis of Radio Silence here; suffice it to say a mad New York inventor named Kenny Schaeffer decided to do battle with the dragon of Soviet power and—with a little help from his friends—brought it down. As a result, I may well have been the first free Russian abroad since 1917. But let’s get back to Aquarium.

Given all this, it was obvious that after 11 Aquarium albums, going to New York to record the 12th one in the same vein would have been strange. A chance meeting with Dave Stewart in Los Angeles determined the musical direction of my “American album,” because Eurythmics, for various reasons, occupied an extraordinary place in my world at the time. The spark caught, the work began. The entire following year became one grand adventure—not “the adventures of a Russian abroad,” but something much more. All the songs (except Radio Silence itself) were written in direct response to the circumstances around me.

The whole process was filmed by director Michael Apted, and released as Long Way Home. Boring—because all the interesting bits were mercilessly cut out by dull American censors. In between sessions I flew back to Russia, where Aquarium carefully listened to everything that had been recorded.

The vocals on Radio Silence are, admittedly, rather weak—out of sheer inexperience. But the songs came through, and I’m glad the album remains an undeciphered hieroglyph. It achieved its purpose. The gods were watching closely, and they responded. One more song was recorded for it, Drama, but, as far as I remember, the tape was never even mixed.

P.S. London, Church Studios. Late at night. We’d spent the day recording with Ray, Annie, and Chrissie. In the evening Billy MacKenzie of The Associates—who was making his solo album downstairs—came up to see how we were doing. We played him the draft of That Voice Again. Five minutes later he was singing it. Everyone in the studio fell silent (this was the full eleven-minute version, not the trimmed CBS edit). Two takes. He walked into the control room and asked: “Will that do?” For several minutes no one could answer a word. We all just sat there, spellbound, afraid to move.

Critics? My condolences, gentlemen critics.

Radio London

A London interlude, 1990. Almost everything was recorded at the home studio of Chucho Merchán, the bassist of Eurythmics, as demos for a follow-up to Radio Silence. I played guitars and sang; he programmed the computer and played bass. Each song took no more than two days. Gakkel flew in to London specifically to help with the music. You don’t hear him on the recordings, but every night during playback there were feathers flying. On our days off we wandered around London, listened to antique music, or chewed the bark of Amazonian oak—and so on.

Fortunately, Sony and I disagreed over the choice of producer (Ray Cooper’s name meant nothing to them, but he was the one I wanted to work with). So the demos never became a finished record; Sony and I parted ways amicably, like ships at sea. One of the songs written during that wonderful time was Elizabeth. And just barely visible on the horizon—though not yet to the human eye—was The Russian Album.

Assa and Other Film Music

Our relationship with cinema—mostly through our beloved Sergei Aleksandrovich Solovyov—went like this. He would say: “I’m making a new film.” We would ask: “What do you need for it?” And he’d reply: “Here’s a studio at Mosfilm [the main Soviet film studio]. Write something, and we’ll see what works.”

So we wrote. Some material we kept for ourselves, some went into the films, and the rest ended up on the album Roses.

It all began with the music for Assa. A record was even released—but in my opinion, the real music for Assa wasn’t on it. I mean those monstrous string improvisations that so perfectly underscored the bleak life and death of Emperor Paul I. Still, we always appreciated the electric version of The Plane that came from that session.

By the time of Roses, we already knew how Mosfilm operated, which meant we could get away with much more (for example, a “Treatise on a Teapot” that gently flowed into The Ship of Fools). That’s why, in my view, Roses can almost be considered a numbered Aquarium album. One track alone—The Commissar—defines an entire period of our lives, at least philosophically. It’s practically Radio Silence.

It was during the Roses sessions that the idea of the Russian-Abyssinian Orchestra first appeared—still embryonic and playful, but already powerful enough to take over half the album. The mystery of Loya Bykanakh remains unsolved—where did it come from? But it came, and it was right. The same principle would later guide the real Russian-Abyssinian Orchestra. (The second vocal on Loya is Andrei Gorokhov from Ado.)

The music for Dom [The House] was much less spontaneous, though it was precisely that project that inspired the creation of the Anna Karenina Quartet. Around the same time we also recorded Polar Explorers and Don’t Stand in the Way.

So overall, cinema’s influence on Aquarium can only be considered entirely positive.

The History of Aquarium. Archive Vol. 3

At a festival in Montreal, our longtime friends Crosby, Stills & Nash, inspired by the Russian spirit, ceremoniously presented Aquarium with a mobile eight-track studio. We set it up in the Palace of Communications in Leningrad, where it became the base for countless experiments and sleepless nights. Time moved centrifugally, with magic and personal problems hanging so thick in the air you could cut them with a knife—a true “transitional period.” But the brothers’ gift didn’t rust away in vain.

Aquarium was mutating. Our old friend Oleg Sakmarov—musicologist by training, psychonaut and rock star by nature (the future Grandfather Vasily, Terminator 4, the Kazan Beast, and the Terror of the Multiverse)—became an official member, and for a while we played with two flutes. After the American tour with the Radio Silence Band, Tit went off on his own, and bass duties briefly returned to Feinstein before being handed to Sergei Berezov. Our longtime sound engineer, explorer of acoustic spaces, and forest man Slava Egorov emigrated to Canada, replaced by Oleg Goncharov, a “future Indian.”

Everything was changing daily. At such speeds, our attempts to record a proper album were doomed—but still, a few songs cut through the chaos. (These recordings circulated among fans as the “unreleased album” Feudalism.)

Stas Namin, a longtime Aquarium admirer, launched SNC Records and offered to release our first CD. As in 1980, something was clearly ending, and something else was beginning—the parallel with Acoustics was obvious. We collected studio experiments, unreleased but beloved live recordings, and added a few tracks recorded especially for the release. History of A gained its third volume, we gained our first CD, and the 1980s were left behind.

The Russian Album

Not to be confused with Aquarium—this was “BG,” or the “BG Band” (same people, different mission). There are over a hundred playful interpretations of the abbreviation BG; the mildest is “Chaos Guaranteed”. When Aquarium-80 ceremoniously dissolved itself in April 1991, new songs poured out as if a dam had burst. Perhaps the very weight of the Aquarium name had been stifling us, holding back any new creative impulse. Now we needed a smaller, acoustic, and very mobile lineup.

It all began with Her Majesty and Nikita. Ryusha, Shchurakov, Ded, and I gathered at the Palace of Communications in Leningrad and, for the first time in years, rehearsed. Then Ded said: “Why don’t we go play a concert in Kazan?” That simple phrase set off a year and a half of touring and a fundamental shift in our music.

The repertoire had to be invented on the fly—often right before concerts. The important thing was to leave as much space as possible between this project and Aquarium. Coming up with a brand-new name would have been silly, but posters had to say something, so we chose the simplest option. During those spring, summer, and autumn tours, The Russian Albumwrote itself. The original acoustic quartet soon, out of habit, grew to include Berezov, and by the end of the year Pyotr had joined as well. The urge to play was so strong we hardly remember going home at all. Thanks to all the towns and roads that inspired these songs. A typically Russian view: the church seen through the bottom of a vodka bottle. Chaos guaranteed.

Recording of The Russian Album began in early 1992 at the Moscow House of Radio (at their kind invitation). Once again we found ourselves in a “state” studio, but Moscow—unlike official Petersburg—had long since learned how to coexist with officialdom, treating it like bad weather. We encountered “the state” at the entrance and exit; inside was our own empire. Even with security in Moscow, you could always come to a human arrangement.

The first people we ran into in the corridors of the House of Radio were our old acquaintances from the Kuryokhin days: Slava Gaivoronsky and Volodya Volkov—trumpet and double bass, respectively. With them, Sirin, Alkonost, Gamayunfound its completion. Later, back in Petersburg on the Fontanka, Gaivoronsky would play on our version of I Want to Be With You and appear again on Ramses. Volkov—or rather one of his bass lines—had once inspired our ancient magnum opus We Will Never Grow Old.

On the train from Petersburg to Moscow, on our way to record, we “accidentally” ran into Alexei Pavlovich Zubarev, a longtime and respected friend from the band Season of Rain (and, according to unverified rumors, a distant descendant of hobbits). Over a bottle of cognac he told us he had left Season and was now free. He always carried his guitar; the very next day he walked into the House of Radio and added it to The Horses. His involvement decided itself.

Letters of Captain Voronin

A concert recording can never capture all the nuances of the band. Russian Symphony, for example, was performed in Vyatka so completely for the first time that no one could predict what chord would come next—yet the telepathic connection was clearly there. During The Critic, our sound engineer crawled onto the stage and performed folk “Indian dances” (something like Swan Lake in reverse).

Ryusha wasn’t in Vyatka; perhaps he had grown tired of diving headfirst, in full uniform, into bathtubs filled with roses, and so he left for Germany to rest and play early music in the “authentic” style. His old acquaintance S. Ryzhenko was urgently summoned to replace him, but upon arrival in Vyatka he couldn’t overcome severe psychological stress. So the concert was played as a quartet.

Across Russia, these wandering minstrels roamed merrily. Mornings in new towns usually began with a visit to the local church—I can probably still recall in which city which icons were hanging in which corner. By June 1991 we were playing on the Solovetsky Islands (bringing with us from Nizhny Novgorod a splendid icon of The Appearance of the Mother of God to Andrei Bogolyubsky). The concert was brightly lit by sparking and burning electrical wires along the opposite wall; in the former refectory (described in detail, they say, in Solzhenitsyn’s chronicles) it hadn’t been warm for decades, until the walls thawed and the wires began to short out. The monks snuck into the concert in secret.

(For balance, it should be noted that on the way to Solovki, the captain of the icebreaker that carried us allegedly drank with us all the alcohol from the ship’s compass fluid—or so eyewitnesses claim.)

Evenings after the concerts were spent over otherworldly amounts of vodka, debating the history of Russian theology, the theory and practice of icon painting, and related subjects. It’s said not all witnesses survived intact.

This went on for almost a year and a half. But by the summer of 1992, it became clear that something new was approaching. We heard a strange prophecy, and together with Ded and Alexei Pavlovich we set out on a concert pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

The Library of Babylon

In truth, this was the first project Aquarium of the “second convocation” began working on. Tit and Ratzen had their own studio on the Fontanka, and when we became one band it was natural to try to use it to the fullest. We started by gathering everything that hadn’t been fully captured on Archive, which led to recording many songs that had never been put on tape before—serving also as a test of the band as a working unit. A good example is The Jungle, a song we had tried to record back with the old Aquarium during The House Under the Starry Sky. On The Library it was carefully reworked in light of new revelations. Even Tit’s dog Chuy makes an appearance—barking faintly at the end of the track, and of course barking backwards in time. Nothing was too sacred to be touched.

The Sands of Petersburg

An experiment in projecting this lineup backward into time—what if everything we had now had also existed back then? The songs were originally written between 1975 and 1986, gathered in my head (and partly finished) while I was in Jerusalem reading a 1907 travel guide to the Volga, and recorded by Aquarium in 1993. The album might never have happened; it wasn’t clear if it was worth resurrecting songs that had long disappeared from our lives. Some entities I consulted during mixing made snide remarks about whether I was right to release everything I wrote (“the graphomaniac syndrome,” one spirit said sardonically).

Yet the overall impression of these recordings turned out to be unexpectedly positive and uplifting. It’s a pity the passage from The Book of the Dead, read through a megaphone at the end of Uncle Thompson, is so hard to make out. The only new song here was St. George’s Day—new in the sense that to two opening lines from 1977 I attached a different song. The ways of the Lord are truly inscrutable; the result was one of my most beloved songs.

The Songs of Vertinsky

There can be no justification for this crime against public taste. That many friends had urged me to do it, and that these songs had been spicing up our concerts since 1983, was no reason to drag them into the studio. Or, if we were going to, then we should have spent ten times longer on them. These songs had always (since I was 10) been respected by me, often sung at night, and they deserve much more than they got.

Kostroma Mon Amour

It was a period when I wanted to write stadium rock ’n’ roll, but only park waltzes came out. All the songs were written on the road. Around that time we connected with the Mongolian folk ensemble Temudzhin—unfortunately we never managed to record with them, but an authentic Mongolian fragment still made its way into Moscow October. Sing, Sing, Lyra was an old forgotten text by George that suddenly leapt out of a notebook and was heavily reworked.

For formality’s sake we recorded again at Melodiya [the Soviet state record label], and although the engineers were good, the feeling of stiffness was unavoidable. (In the end, we used the version of Lyra recorded at the Fontanka studio instead.) To pull the album out of its total-waltz state, we added I Need You and Suvlekhim—songs first written back in summer ’88 at Valdai, together with Voronin, Skobelev, When the Pain Passes, and Royal Morning. It was a natural move, since both songs were already staples at concerts of the time, letting us go full overdrive and say things directly.

The walls on Pushkinskaya Street were repainted a dark Tibetan red; I went to Nepal and came back—after visiting all the lamas and all the stupas—with the finished album cover and a strong desire to re-record all the vocals (which turned out to be quite reasonable—after a week wandering through caves and monasteries, one really does sing better. Since then, that’s how we’ve done it). It was there, too, that Gertrude was finally completed, after drifting around Russia for a long time but finding its final form on the main street of Kathmandu.

The album turned out uncontrived—and therefore much loved. Exactly as Aquarium should be. “Little precise sounds”—that was one of the early definitions of Aquarium, back in 1973.

Navigator

It all began on a train to Odessa. I woke up around three in the morning, tormented by thirst and by a line circling in my head that wouldn’t let me sleep: “The Badaev warehouses roar and burn…” What warehouses? Why roar and burn? No answer. (Eventually this became Katya-Katerina—and didn’t even make it onto the album.) But the spark was lit. Songs that write themselves, almost without the author’s conscious thought.

It continued the same way in our village: The Turn, The Ficus, and others—one song a day. After the village came Paris: a big concert at the Théâtre de la Ville, just a week after Bulat Okudzhava had played there. For that show, the small local label Buda Records released our first Western “big hits” compilation (Boris Grebenshikov & Aquarium, 1991–1994). The flood of songs didn’t stop. Each morning I sat in a café on the boulevards, drinking coffee and writing down whatever came. Out came Sisters, Navigator, Garçon, Maxim the Woodsman, and Mayetsa. All in one week. Believe me—this doesn’t happen.

The wave continued in Kathmandu, where The Cemetery and Nastassia’s Song were born. That whole winter we recorded demos on Pushkinskaya Street (The Airplane and The Customs Blues were added there). It became clear the album needed the sound of a violin, so Ryusha brought in his colleague in early music, Andrei Surotdinov, who immediately and flawlessly joined our ragged ranks.

In the spring, Aleksei Pavlovich, Sergei Shchurakov, and I played a concert in London. There, unexpectedly, I ran into my old acquaintance Joe Boyd—the very same Joe Boyd of The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and half the history of rock ’n’ roll. He offered a few compliments and said he’d like to help with the recordings if he could.

A month later I was checking out Livingston Studios and meeting Kate St. John. She played oboe brilliantly, knew an incredible number of musicians, and loved our songs almost as much as I did. For two months we faxed each other several times a day, fine-tuning arrangements and comparing the madness of our methods. Then summer came, and the real recording began.

It was simple: take the Tube to the center, ride the Piccadilly Line out to Wood Green, then walk three minutes to the studio. A quiet London morning. Jerry Boys—the owner and chief engineer, who had started back with the Beatles—spun the tape with a joke. Young Simon brought fresh coffee. “What shall we start with today?”

“Less more flute, please!” shouted Ded from the mic (a phrase that became a standing joke at Livingston Studios). Bands recording next door tried to lure Shchurakov away to decorate their tracks with his improbably beautiful accordion. “I’ll come tomorrow,” said Mick Taylor. Jerry, who had known him for years, smiled: “He’ll probably show up by the end of the week.” Sure enough, Mick arrived Thursday evening, asked me to translate the lyrics, then cranked his guitar to ten and played everything in twenty minutes.

At that moment, it felt as if we had slipped into orbit. The world, finally, had become one place—not divided into nations and political districts.

In the end, a Russian only becomes truly Russian once he stops being dependent on his local precinct.

Snow Lion

The burst of songwriting that gave us Navigator didn’t stop there. The same village handed me The Fighter, while walks in the unearthly heat and silence of the Valley of the Kings crystallized into Ancient Russian Longing. At first it seemed the natural thing was to make a mischievous lo-fi sequel to Navigator, and of course call it Alligator. But the demos showed it was something far more serious, and it was time to head back to Livingston Studios.

Around that time, on a Petersburg–Moscow flight, a bearded young poet approached me and gave me a book of his poems. Normally I have a violent allergy to almost any poetry—but this book opened itself, and I stumbled on two lines. Within a week I realized I couldn’t escape them. I called the number written in the book and confessed that his words had struck home and were already turning into a song. A ridiculous situation. But he seemed to understand, and he gave his blessing. The poet’s name was Andrei Chernov. The lines were:

The train driver himself doesn’t know
That he’s carrying you to me.

And so, back we went to London. The Mellotron (the very one that plays at the start of Railway Symphony) was still waiting for us from the Navigator sessions.

Listening carefully, Jerry [Boys, engineer at Livingston] said: “I think I know how this ought to sound.” He tracked down some old sound-processing equipment, gathering dust since the end of ’68. A family of Indians arrived with sitars and tampuras; a woman came with a Celtic harp, giggling with a witchy laugh; and an older, calm, bearded man arrived with Uilleann pipes (ancient Irish bagpipes). He listened to the tracks and asked, “Do you need me to play something specially written, or just what I hear here?” I said: “The music of the gods.” “I know,” he replied, played, and left.

The express train in Longing was simulated by Bob Loveday of Aquarium’s beloved Penguin Café Orchestra. The middle-eight of Silver Rose was written by Kate [St. John] (with one or two mantras added on my part), and the center of Brahman by Sergei Sh. (Incidentally, the full title of Rose is The Silver Rose Strips the World.) Bit by bit, what had started as Alligator turned into something else—though it still had no name.

And then, on the road from Vyatka to Moscow, I woke in the middle of the night with Snow Lion: at once the name, the cover, and the track order. It had arrived—and everything fell into place.

Chubchik

It all began back in the same Palace of Communications studio, in early 1992. After recording music for Tikhomirov’s film Grass and Water, we couldn’t refuse when asked to write music for the animated film Mitki-Mayer. The songs we recorded for it were forgotten for a long time, and when the tapes resurfaced years later, they caused quite a stir (meaning: quite a lot of vodka was consumed to them).

The second batch was The Raven and Darling, recorded at the Fontanka studio during the Sands and Vertinsky sessions. The third part came in the winter of 1995–96, at the Pushkinskaya studio, where we recorded all the demos for Navigatorand Snow Lion. The temperature hovered around zero, there was no gas or heat, and the electricity flickered on and off by the minute. Heroic conditions, to put it plainly. But also—great joy.

And so my chronicle ends. Almost all of its characters took part in shaping it. Let me say again: this is not a “history of Aquarium,” but simply scattered stories of our recordings, with occasional glimpses of the bigger picture—without which this chronicle would make no sense. The full story was known only to us, but as the saying goes: “Anyone who claims to remember what really happened in Aquarium was never actually in Aquarium.”

And the songs don’t belong to us, but to those who listen. They are yours, not ours. We were just lucky enough to be part of their recording.

Section: Memoirs and Recollections
Date: 1997
Author: Boris Grebenshchikov

Also, in book

BG. Songs
Published by Lean, 1997.
528 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. Print run: 7,000 copies. (Second edition, revised and expanded by the author).

Before the Leningrad Rock Club and the AnTrop studio, Morozov was an unquestioned authority for at least two generations of musicians. His work at the time, free of stylistic or ideological constraints, largely anticipated the phenomenon of tape culture. When asked in an interview how many albums he had recorded, Yury answered, “14 kilos.”

Recording Process

As early as 1973, he recorded a full psychedelic album in his home studio. The Cherry Garden of Jimi Hendrix was 33 minutes of music that took a month and a half to make, 10–12 hours a day.

Jimi Hendrix’s “Cherry Garden” was recorded on a Jupiter-201 stereo and an Aidas-19M tape recorder. Back in ’75, a bunch more songs were laid down at a pro studio. During the sessions, Morozov used a bunch of self-built devices, like a tube mixer, an amplitude modulator, a plate reverb, a tape-loop reverb, an electromechanical sound converter, and two homemade tube amplifiers. Microphones: AKG C-12, Neumann 269, MD-47, MD-201.

Morozov would later write an autobiographical book in which he tells the story from the perspective of two subpersonalities: himself as a musician and himself as a sound engineer. Each time, he narrates the work process from the outside:

Working 10–12 hours a day was slowed down by the most basic equipment. They first recorded the drum and guitar backings with a homemade three-tube, three-input mixer onto a two-track Aidas. Then, we mixed them down onto one channel of the Yupiter, and we overdubbed extra parts during the transfer. Managing the balance and adjusting the tone during each bounce was a constant headache. After all that prep, there was just one free channel on the Jupiter that he could use for vocals and lead guitar. Sometimes he’d squeeze in a pre-recorded track from the Aidas, sync it by hand to the playback speed of the Yupiter channel, and overdub a vocal or guitar solo on top.

One of the key tools was a 1×1.5-meter sheet of metal, hung in the corner of the room with two soldered capsules attached. It was used as a tone block, a reverb unit, and sometimes even as a mic. The distorted tone of the lead guitar in a lot of the tracks was also done with it.

Often, whether because I wasn’t around or because of his need to do everything himself, he’d run the whole process alone. It looked like a circus act from the outside. It was draped with microphones and wires, and he had headphones on. There was a metal sheet clanging in the corner. He held the record-switch cable between his teeth—because his hands were busy with the guitar—and stomped his right foot on a tambourine fixed to a spring stand, and his left on the echo or volume control. With a quick nod, he’d start the recorder, spit out the cable, and immediately start yelling, playing guitar, hitting the tambourine with one foot and adjusting the levels with the other.

I’ve seen him like this a few times, and every time I’m amazed by how obvious it is—it’s like a physical example of having a split consciousness, or, to use the technical term, his “multichannel mind.”

— For me, the idea of multitrack recording is fascinating because it feels like an act of godlike creation. I take all these separate pieces and put them together to make a musical universe. I mix and match them, change their shape, and play them at different speeds—or even backwards. In the future, computers could help us build entire universes from even smaller pieces of the living world. Right now, samplers are doing something similar, storing these pieces in blocks of memory. But I’m worried that the end result will be music made by robots, for robot-like listeners.

From the album’s 1993 edition sleeve notes:

One summer in 1973, a young man who was obsessed in surrealism and rock music locked himself in a small apartment. His friends were two tape recorders, a few homemade gadgets, amps, mixers, a set of instruments put together in a rush, and a lot of crazy thoughts.

For days on end, the room shook with loud crashes, clangs, shouts, and the sound of a guitar being played. Every so often, a mysterious lady would come in with a man playing the flute and harmonica. Whenever they joined in, the noise became so loud that the neighbors’ patience reached its limits. But mostly, the crazy man played music by himself, using two or three instruments at once with both hands and feet. When technology didn’t measure up, the ingenuity of the Slavic people and the influence of Jimi Hendrix made up for it. This unique rock performance, with its colorful and mystical style, was made possible by the influence of Hendrix.

He ignored the start of communism in Asia and Africa and the amazing success of the five-year plans that were slow to change. By the time he left that smoky, energy-filled room, he was wild-haired, skinny, and not young anymore. He was also almost wise. He had just made the first true psychedelic rock record in Russia. The music includes an acoustic guitar, a harmonium, and a chainsaw-like instrument. The melodies blend with the sound of a toilet flushing, then change into the voice of an electric crow. The music then changes into mantras, church bells, and machine-gun fire.

But the most important part of the album wasn’t the noise, the tricks, or the parody. The most important thing was the music itself—something that comes to Earth maybe once every hundred years, and that can’t be repeated because the paths of the planets align only once in thousands of kalpas. From the moment Jimi Hendrix played “Purple Haze,” the rock-and-ballet proletarians experienced a new and powerful religion and joined the global rock community as full members. Congratulations—you’re only twenty years late.

Hare Hendrix. Hare Beatles. Hare USSR

After this album, Morozov started working with Yuri Berendyukov (Yabloko), and later with Andrei Tropillo (who was influenced by Morozov’s ideas) as a sound engineer.

His wife, Nina Morozova, did the cover art for his recordings. A lot of her illustrations ended up being used again in reissues of his archives on vinyl and compact discs.

Full Album

Tracklist

1. The Day Will Come
2. Gestures About the Inexplicable
3. My Friend, The Pony
4. Hippie Song
5. Jimi Hendrix’s Cherry Orchard
6. The Presence Effect
7. God Is Stronger Than Us
8. If I Were a Rich Man
9. Requiem for a Six-String Guitar and a Boa Constrictor
10. Dear Friend
11. In the Kingdom of Masks
12. Geisha Exhibition

With a wild mix of influences from the Beatles, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath, all blended with church bells, machine-gun fire, and even toilet flushes, it was true psychedelic madness, closer to Sgt. Pepper than to any Soviet tradition. Even now, it sounds like a classic psychedelic album from the 70s.

Composer David Tukhmanov, whose 1976 concept album On the Wave of My Memory became one of the first Soviet records to feature an original cover design, also said that he was among the first to release true albums on the state label Melodiya in the early 1970s:

“Most of the audio releases back then were just compilations—collections of songs by a single lyricist or a single performer. My very first record, How Beautiful the World Is, released by Melodiya in 1972, already carried the traits of a real album: recurring themes, songs flowing into each other, a sense of conceptual unity. I was able to realize this idea more fully with On the Wave of My Memory.

Only the album format allowed me to bring my sonic and compositional ideas to life. At the time there was an extreme shortage of equipment, and the whole concert scene was completely unprepared for works of this kind.”

The songs were set to carefully chosen examples of world classical poetry from different eras, selected by his then-wife, Tatyana Sashko. David Tukhmanov, 35, spent the summer and fall of 1975 working on the record.

It was, in a lot of ways, the official Soviet Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—and not by accident. In a bunch of interviews, Tukhmanov himself said that that famous Beatles record was his inspiration and then he tricked the artistic council:

Of course, this idea was inspired by the Beatles because it was, they who began releasing albums with conceptual titles and a suite-based approach…I was afraid that anything related to pop would be

prohibited. But I managed to mislead the artistic council. I said it would be a classical performance—and sang it in a classical style. Then the rhythm was changed.

Cover Art

Designer Alexander Shvarts:

“I did part of the work in my studio and part of it in Tukhmanov’s apartment. I’d listen to different music, talk with David—who was usually sitting at the piano—and think. Then came the paper, the pen, and the work.

Back then, the Art Council had total ideological and artistic power. I was an artist, and I always did what I felt was right. The first version of the cover was fully hand-drawn. The council said it was “incompatible with the ideals of socialist realism” and banned it.

The second version was just a gradual stripping away of the drawn imagery. The censors literally cut it up with scissors, and what remained is what got released. No one asked for my approval.

I’m happy to be recognized as the author of the first Soviet album cover, but from an artistic standpoint, it was completely ruined.”

Variations

There are a bunch of original editions, plus a few modern versions of the cover:

Full album

© Artur Netsvetaev

• https://archives.colta.ru/docs/21348
• https://novozhilov.at.ua/publ/5-1-0-8